One of the big questions is, “Why are we here?” When I ask God about this, and it comes up pretty often, he doesn’t generally give me an answer that’s meaningful in any significant way. So I was kind of surprised when something relevant came up in an entirely different conversation.

I was asking God what he thought about the anthropic principle. For those of you that don’t know, the anthropic principle sort of makes us responsible for the entire state of the universe. Okay, it doesn’t really do that. Briefly stated: Within the limits of what science has so far been able to figure out about the history of the universe, there seem to be a number of things that had to be amazingly “just so” in order for life to have developed. These cosmological constants are used as one of the supporting principles for Intelligent Design, the idea being that God must have “fiddled with the knobs” to fine tune the universe to make it hospitable to us. The anthropic principle counters this by saying that if the universe had not, out of all the possible permutations, come up with the one set that made us possible, than we would not have been here to observe these constants, so we could only be even asking the question if the answers were what the answers are.

To put it even more briefly, albeit metaphorically, just because whenever I look straight into a mirror I see myself, doesn’t mean that my image is inside every mirror.

Anyway, God made sort of an offhand remark that he preferred the entropic principle, which I’d never heard of. He said the entropic principle is the notion that he created us as a force to fight against entropy. The gist of entropy is that everything in the universe tends inexorably towards chaos. So God’s suggestion was that “why” we’re here is to make things less chaotic. It’s an interesting thought.